Seeing the light

THE ghostly glow lighting deep-sea vents is caused by a simple chemical reaction, researchers in the US suggest. Their experiments, which recreate the environment of hydrothermal vents, may resolve a puzzle that has dogged scientists for more than a decade.

Oceanographers first detected faint light from hydrothermal vents in the ocean floor 11 years ago. Most of the light is thermal radiation from the hot vent water. But the heat cannot account for some of the shorter wavelength light, which is an orange-yellow colour. Attempts to explain what produces this light have ranged from the tiny flashes that occur as minerals crystallise to the collapse of bubbles under the pressure of the abyss (see "The light at the bottom of the sea", New Scientist, 13 December 1997, p 42).

But now David Tapley of Salem State College in Massachusetts and Malcolm Shick of the University of Maine at Orono ...

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